DataMan for iPhone lifts the lid on your data-hungry apps and tells you when you hit your monthly limit

With apps coming out of our ears, it can be easy to lose track of the amount of data being consumed by our beloved smartphones. Even when you’re not actively using an app, you can still be unwittingly chewing up your valuable bits of data and, well, not really know where all your money’s going.

Of course, if you’re on a genuine all-you-can-eat data plan, then you’re laughing. But many ‘unlimited’ plans aren’t really unlimited, therefore you may find this app of use.

DataMan has been in the public domain for almost two years, and there is a free version and a Pro version with additional features. A new version of DataMan Pro has hit the App Store this past week, introducing a host of handy new features to help you monitor your data-usage.

In a nutshell, DataMan now shows you when, where and what apps are chomping into your data. It displays the usage at certain times of the day, displaying which apps were eating into your wallet and when.

This helps you discover when apps are active and how much data they are eating. So you can root out the data-hungry apps and save money (and likely battery power too).

Whilst the App Watch feature lets you see what apps are using your data, it only shows the data used by a list of apps within a certain hour, sorted according to activity. For the next update, we’re told that the exact data used by each app over a certain time period will be unveiled.

This latest incarnation of the app also brings in location-accuracy options for geo-tagging. The previous version offered something similar, but it didn’t allow the user to specify how accurate DataMan should be in capturing the location, and was restricted to within 3km to save battery. Based on user feedback, users now have the option to specify exactly where they are, if they so wish.

Throw into the mix the ‘Within-a-Minute’ functionality, which alerts you the minute you exceed a pre-set threshold, then we have on our hands a very nifty app.

The old version of the app only checked usage every ten minutes, meaning the alert could come too late and a user has already gone over their allowance. Now they can choose to check more often, i.e. every minute.

A neat idea for sure, but it’s probably also worth mentioning Onavo here, a startup we’ve covered a number of times in the past. The app works by intercepting your data connection and channeling it through Onavo’s own compression technology. It still uses your mobile network, but because less data is used, your bill is smaller. It began life as iPhone-only in April last year, before porting over to Android a few months later and, well, it also helps you monitor data, to show you which apps are consuming the most mobile data.

With smartphones comes the need for data. And the need to manage consumption of this data is stronger than ever.